WebmasterWorld's confessional.

The only way to repent is to confess first

[Macguru]

OK, here it goes.

I made my first site at no charge for practical training at the end of a course. It was for a broke local glass artist association. It used frames and had a counter on home page. We had 30 000 visitors in 2 years.

I feel better now.

Who's turn is it?

[kapow]

My first site (4 years ago) was for a friend who had a small business.
Frames (which I thought were so useful).
Scrolling "marquee" text (from a java aplet I stole).
Huge ugly background image.
Counter (inflated).
One of those ringing phone animated gifs (actually I still use one of those on one of my site).
Font tags every where.

It was accepted free into Yahoo (those were the days)
I used selfpromotion.com to submit it to a million search engines.

Later I wanted some fancy functions for the site so I bought a book about Java - read half of it, discovered it wasn't what I wanted so bought another book on ASP - read half of it... finally heard of PHP through the host I used - started reading a book - never looked back.

[4serendipity]

I'll take the fifth on this one :)

[Rhadamanthus]

My best friend and I co-ran a BBS back in the last few glorious years before anybody other than us nerds knew what the Internet was (aka the dark ages - 1993-6 time frame). Dan's mom paid for the phone line, and we ran it on an old PC XT that we bought for $20 (even at that it was way overpriced) and installed a hard drive in. It ran at about 4MHz and had about 450K of RAM. We had to do some heavy modification to the source code of the BBS software that we got in order to even make it load into system memory - the distribution version required 640K of RAM. While we were at it, we modded the snot out of the system. We added the ability to group users, and gave our groups cool sounding names that I can't remember to save my life. We put up a few cheesy "online" games. But best of all, we developed our own fully functional ANSI-graphics based GUI that worked beautifully over a 14.4 modem. Not bad for a couple of high school kids. Then the $##*&! Internet came along and killed the BBS community. :(

Since then, I've done a few random pages here and there (thank god none of them are still around - they're pretty embarrassing), but I didn't get serious about webmastering until I put up my most recent site a few months ago - and this one I'm actually fairly proud of.

[deft_spyder]

This is thinking WAY back, but my first site was "optimized for Mosaic", and built with AOL Press.

It consisited mostly of jokes I stole from other sites, a list of my friends and how cool they were, and .... thats about it.

Ahh, you remember that one cool gif that had two lights (red/green) pulsing slowly on and off. I think I featured those! The knight rider looking one as well.

[hasbeen]

My first attempt at a commercial venture was a site I created for the company I was working for at the time. A rather large Fortune 500 company, mind you.

Suffice it to say it had a huge graphic on the "Splash Page" that, when you moused over it, said "Enter"....ughh. I can't believe I even previewed it for our Regional Vice President (although, to save myself somewhat, he did say he liked it). The thing never got implemented, thankfully.

[mivox]

I made a huge splash page for an early site that I (thankfully) never really finished... great big sliced graphic with rollover nav buttons to the different areas of the site, all embossed and shiny looking... and the rollovers even changed a section of the big center graphic! I was so proud of myself...

Egads.

<added>My plan was to create a web directory, and then charge people to have their sites listed at the top of the category results. Then I stopped working on it when I thought, "That's stupid. Nobody would every PAY to be listed at the top of a search result!" I should have ditched the splash page and stuck with the business plan, I guess... hehe</added>

[toadhall]

My first site consisted of -

a) an animated gif of a confused cat named Sylvia singing "Who Is Sylvia" (no sound) with a fly buzzing around her head.

b) a joke about Einstein's claim that God doesn't play dice (he plays marbles).

c) a meta page where a long nosed fellow in a ball cap gamely states all the meta language he's ever learned (tarsal, physics, phor, bolism, etc.)

d) and an ANSI roadmap to the Lesser Magellanic Cloud.

It was, um, experimental you understand.

T

[lorax]

*oog* I've avoided thinking about that first website for years. It was a FrontPage website done for a non-profit and I think I only missed a few of the things that you're NOT supposed to do.

I've since repeated many of them and committed others. Hopefully I've corrected enough of my bad habits now that I've earned a spot in webmaster purgatory!

[edited by: lorax at 6:50 pm (utc) on April 2, 2003]

[quotations]

My first site was made by taking the glossy brochures which my defense contractor employer handed out at trade shows, scanning the pictures and getting someone to re-type the words, and putting the entire mess up on the web.

We were using lynx back when we started but Mosaic was on its way.

The page load times must have been measured in weeks.

[OddDog]

I did my first web about 4 years back.

It had the snaking mouse effect of red dots ...

It was hosted on a freeserver account ...

It was horrible ...

I had not content ...

It had no purpose ...

I apologies for helping to spread trash across the net.

[dwilson]

My first site was to support my parents' effort as selling their own home. This must have been about 1996 ... I think.

It had a counter and "Price Reduced" was in the <blink> tags.

[volatilegx]

Well, my very first site was done in HotDog, and had some awful Java animated characters floating around the screen and embedded music. I have since repented and begged forgiveness.

My first commercial site still had awful design, but loaded fast and sported a nifty JavaScript shopping cart that actually worked on both Netscape and MSIE.

Dan

[badger_uk]

My first site had links to other sites where you could get free adult stuff. Due to strict UK laws one of my competitors got 9 months (had a similar site). The site was off the net within minutes. :)

badgeruk

[JonB]

i confess -i started with s3x banners - earn per click. 5 or more years ago when i started i used to believe that when placing s3x banners on website will earn me a lot of money.needless to say i was not paid a singel cent althouzgh stats showed a lot of money..they never paid me..at that time i found a non s3x affiliate ,deleted all s3x banners and redesigned my site (1 page site designed with frontpage express,with GREEN bacground,yellow text, only text,no tables..it sucked!) and 5 years later i still earn a lot of money from this affiliate..that is basically all i did in 5 years on the web...

[wardbekker]

Together with a friend i started a small company. Our company website..

.. had a 3-logo
.. the logo had an "@" for the a
.. was hosted on a free tripod (now lycos) account

and the worst part,

we forgot the password, so it's stil online as of today

[Hollywood]

First customer an internet stock company Mrswing after loosing a QA job for Ingram Micro, now his site is on the top three spots for "Swing Trading" on Yahoo/Google/AOL

Now working on retainer for one of the largest headhunter organizations nationwide plus many others.

1st year - plenty of work, barely keeping up. Going strong!

~Hollywood

[tankman]

My first site was a resource of buttons and bars and dot graphics for the web design firm I helped start in 95. Everything was so cheese back then but no one really noticed. There was still a fairly big out cry that existed back then to prevent the internet from becoming to commercial!

[rfontaine]

I made ugly html websites for a library and asian adoption agency on geocities. They even paid me!

But I CAN say this: I have never used a WYSIWYG editor. I took the time to actually learn how to code. Never looked back.

Now I have a gig as a full time webmaster and life is good.

[Alphawolf]

Well, sorry to state I started out "right".

I was involved with the Networking and PC Support side of things and left the web stuff up to the 'programmer' type.

I recall downloadign a trial of Dreamweaver once and thinking, 'yeah- ok.'.

Had the idea for a business website and investigationg what was the 'best shopping cart' I ended up learning too much.

Soon, I decided to download the trial of Dreamweaver again. I bought 4-5 of the top rated books to learn Dreamweaver/HTML/CSS/Flash/ASP/ColdFusion and did all the projects and started to 'get it'.

My friend just happened to want to upgrade his business website and asked if I could do it. I did...learned a lot.

Then I upgraded his site again after I learned much more from this board. :)

Now awaiting the Google update to see results of my first SEO work.

So, although I've been involved with 'puters since '93, I just started web development 1 year ago.

It's great to be able to sit down with a software suite like Macromedia MX and actually be able to make it do what you want. ;)

AW

[Allergic]

My first one was in 95. Java Applet to do MouseOver at the time I was coding for post-Mosaic and the first Netscape. The owner was the only worker but have a good exclusive product and a really small 150 square foot office. Now they moved downtown, pass over the 2000 bubble drop and got a full floor and haved 100 peoples working for him.

[TomWaits]

I created a site for a book I wrote. The pictures are 600K .bmp files that I uploaded. And the thumbnails of those pics aren't thumbnails, they're scaled to fit <img src="" height=20 width=20>, etc. The homemade banner I made for it to put in LinkExchange, before MSFT bought them, was something I created in PaintShop cutting and pasting Lewinsky & Clinton pictures (they have nothing to do with the book). The Tripod guestbook is still up there, which I just read for the first time in a few years. All guest entries are intact. There are .mid files of acoustic versions of a few songs. The background is wallpaper that was being called from someone else's site.

I'm sincerely sorry.

[metablue]

Mine had a fuzzy grey background with an embossed logo, scrolling marqee text, huge graphics, and several animated rainbow bars. I avoided the <blink> tags because I'd heard they were irritating.

We got listed for free in Yahoo in less than 2 weeks, and I ended up paying my way through college with it - we were selling a how-to booklet.

[globay]

I designed my first page with an WYSIWYG Editor in 1996. The background image had so much contrast in it, that I just adjusted the font color in the middle of the words to make it easier readable :o

[DrDoc]

My first site was extremely simple. It had some animated gifs and some other rant...

Then, of course, my friend (who had been messing with HTML for about 1 month longer than me) showed me his super-duper site.

"Well, if he can do that, so can I"... So, my first page only lasted for about 2 hours before it was replaced with something else.

This second site was ranked #1 personal home page by Netscape. During the first year only, visitors came from Novell, Oracle, Microsoft, IBM, Compaq, Hewlett Packard, Dell, Volvo, General Motors, Saab, Ford, Disney Studios, Universal Studios, NASA, U.S.S. Enterprise, The White House, and 76 of the world's sovereign states. I put an HTML course on there which was ranked #2 (after HTML Writers' Guild) by some funky computer magazine...

Scary! Some of my old sites can be found on archive.org <shudder>

<added>I forgot to mention... My first few sites all had a "Built using Notepad" gif. :)</added>

[willybfriendly]

I had things to sell and was in a VERY rural area. Hate paying others for what I can do myself, so I grabbed a couple of books and self taught. Oh, I confess, I tried Front Page, but never completed a project in it. It just looked too canned.

Uploaded my site didn't get any traffic.

Started surfing the boards trying to learn how to get up in the rankings.

Started getting traffic.

The site went through some permutations. I got a few compliments and then someone asked me to overhaul their site.

Now I do a couple of sites a month, and a little bit of SEO on the side. Thanks to the information I have gleaned, mainly from here, the last site I did SEO on attained several top 5 Google SERPS (and one #1) on the first update after I was done with it.

I still consider myself a neophyte and bow down before those that have so freely shared of their knowledge and experience. You folks are great.

[feeder]

My first site had scrolling text, a graphical background, loud colours, bad clip art and blinking elements.

Nothing has changed.

[Hefner]

My first page I had made was actually with my best friend for his father's company (why someone would search for that crap was beyond me). We loaded up the Adobe Pagemill, and went to work adding really flashy .GIF files and backgrounds that appeared to be moving. Talk about a real professional site eh? Although we did rank #1 on many engines for years (probably because we were the only dolts to make a page for that boring industry). We did feel like "elite hackers" don't ask why, we were in grade school, and felt cool.

[austtr]

Back in 1995, in a manic gesture of a) mindless bravado b) crass stupidity c) drunken stupor (I've forgotten which)... I decided to make my first site, not a town guide, not a regional guide, not a state guide... but a guide for the whole bl**dy country! No half measures for this puppy!

And what's more I was going to learn HTML and do the entire site in hand coding. Reality set in very quickly, and after an initial dabble with HotDog I switched to Frontpage and a copy of "Frontpage For Dummies". I did get to know something about code... from having to unpick all the c*** that Frontpage left everywhere.

Well the site got done in 1997, its still there, frames and all... and fluctuates up and down the top 5 for its key search terms. I still use Frontpage (too lazy to change) and I've never read another book.

But I do read a lot.... right here. I will be forever indebted to the folk in these forums who share their knowledge and experiences so that stories like this one can be repeated many time over.

[europeforvisitors]

I made my first site, a collection of writing-related Web links, to complement the Writing Forum that I was running as a contract forum manager for MSN back in 1995. It launched in January of 1996, it later morphed into a collection of articles for aspiring writers, and it's still around. (I created it with HotDog Pro and Notepad; later, I rebuilt it with NetObjects Fusion, which I was reviewing for BOARDWATCH Magazine at the time.)

I created my second site in spring of 1996 when I needed to build a sample site for a review of FrontPage 1.1. I'd just returned from a trip to Venice, so I scanned my photos and threw together one of the first English-language travel sites about Venice, Italy. That site is still around, too, and it's featured in a number of guidebooks.

Neither of those sites is the one mentioned in my profile, by the way. (That site is quite a bit newer, although much of its content comes from About.com sites that my wife and I created back in 1997 and 1998.)

[joeuz]

Ah, you guys are all amateurs. I started on the web way when there was nobody else there. A fellow graduate research assistant got stuck with writing a thesis about this new "World Wide Web" thing and she couldn't figure out how to compile that first version of Mosaic she downloaded for the NeXT computer. Being the gentleman I am, I had to learn a bit about it to help her out.

Then I thought that it would be a cool idea to build a few websites about different major cities (yup, the domain names were still available). Then on second thought, I figured that nobody would view them anyway, and opted to create a humorous "personal" website. Anybody cares to use me as a synonym to "shortsightedness" is welcome. But hey, the website did have a Ziggy horizontal line at the bottom, and the HTML source was completely written using "vi", so it was pretty cool after all.